This post was developed via a partnership with BetterHelp.
While a fear of failure is something that we experience at various points in our lives, for a lot of individuals, the worrying can become excessive and distracting. This article will share some tips on how you can address your fear of failing so that you can focus your energy on your goals and envision success.
Change Your Thoughts On Both Failure & Success
Many people become so concerned about failing because they have a preconceived notion of what it means to fail and succeed.
For the former, people can have a distorted perspective regarding failure, and if things don’t go right, it can feel catastrophic, and the outcomes can be hard to accept.
Instead of focusing on these negative aspects, you can find positive ones, and there is a lot that can be gained from situations that you might consider a failure. If it becomes a learning experience that you can reflect on and improve your performance, it’s not a failure, especially if it leads to succeeding more often in the future.
Allow Yourself To Make Mistakes
For some people, failure can sometimes mean not doing a task perfectly, and they have expectations that they placed on themselves that they should perform at such a high standard.
Although it’s excellent to have such a strong work ethic and a desire to succeed, perfectionism can be quite draining on one’s mental health due to the anxiety it causes.
Making mistakes absolutely doesn’t mean that you’re a failure, and don’t expect yourself to be perfect, and certainly don’t avoid making them because you could be robbing yourself of valuable learning opportunities.
Manage Your Tasks
Feeling overwhelmed about the work in front of you can definitely aggravate a fear of failure, but luckily, this can be one of the easier fixes you can make.
All you have to do is break your tasks into smaller chunks and manage your time so that you can give your attention to the individual steps you need to take to achieve your goal.
This can help you see yourself making smaller successes along the way, which will inevitably lead to doing well in the larger picture. Always remember, though, it doesn’t need to be perfect, and you can be proud of your accomplishments even if you might consider them insignificant.
Practice Mindfulness & Positive Self-Talk
Lastly, one critical mistake people make is that they try to push away or neutralize negative thoughts or they internalize them and this leads to the chronic anxiety and depression seen in a lot of people with a fear of failure.
One way to overcome this might seem counterintuitive, but you should simply accept the negative thoughts in your head as they appear and don’t respond to them. This is known as mindfulness, and it can help you remain calm when you experience unwanted thoughts that give you distress, like self-criticism.
However, you can also find mantras that can help you deal with anxiety, such as “I am doing my best,” “this thought will pass soon,” “I will succeed,” and “I can overcome this feeling,” just to name a few examples that can keep you calm when struggling with self-doubt.
Additional Resources For You
Fear, anxiety, and paranoia are all strong feelings that can be challenging to address, but by utilizing a lot of the strategies laid out for you, such as the ones in this article, you can overcome them. In fact, if you’d like to learn more about what you can do for these kinds of negative feelings and emotions, you can read articles like this one at BetterHelp.
Also, dealing with them can be tricky to do on your own, and if you feel that your fears and worries are holding you back from being happy with yourself, you are encouraged to connect to a licensed professional, which you can also learn how to do by visiting BetterHelp today.
Conclusion
A fear of failure can be very persistent, and some people can struggle with it for their entire lives; however, by addressing it and incorporating proven strategies both on your own and with extra support, you can change your thoughts about failure and find successes even when things don’t go as planned.
